Italian Cultural Institute: PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA’S PLACE IN RENAISSANCE INTELLECTUAL CULTURE

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) is widely known to have been a partner in philosophy with Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) the leading figure of the Renaissance revival of Platonism. Pico is also popular as the author of a speech On the Dignity of Man, which has become a signature text of humanist and Renaissance appreciation of the peculiar role of humanity in the world. Less known is Pico’s commentary on the beginning of Genesis, his critique of astrology, and, indeed, his critique of Ficino’s Platonism. This conversation will tie the various endeavors of this prolific thinker into the context of the humanist movement and the fruitfulness of his work for present day thought, and will discuss the evolution of Pico’s attitude toward astrology, how his views related to other aspects of his thought and to developments in science in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Tuesday, November 11

6PM

Italian Cultural Institute

686 Park Avenue

New York

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Paul Richard Blum is T.J. Higgins, S.J., Professor in Philosophy at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore. Before moving to the US, in 2002, he was professor of Philosophy at Catholic Péter Pázmány University in Budapest (Hungary). Recently he was guest professor at Palacký University in Olomouc (Czech Republic). In Munich (Germany) he obtained his PhD with a book on Giordano Bruno’s interpretation of Aristotle; he then researched and taught at Free University Berlin, where he obtained his professorial degree with a book on Late Scholasticism and the modern concept of philosophy (Philosophenphilosophie und Schulphilosophie, 1998). This research on the Aristotelian tradition in modernity was continued and collected in a volume Studies on Early Modern Aristotelianism (2012). The purpose of such studies is to calibrate the meaning of philosophy over history and to integrate Renaissance philosophy into the concept of ‘early modernity’. This was also one key idea in Blum’s Philosophy of Religion in the Renaissance (2010), in which Giovanni Pico, Marsilio Ficino, but also early humanists and late Renaissance provocateurs (Bruno, Campanella) played an important role. Blum has edited a number of Renaissance texts, from Bruno via Ficino and Pico to early Jesuits. In 201o he edited a text book Philosophers of the Renaissance. He is currently working on the translation and edition of a treatise on the immortality of the soul by Gasparo Contarini, a prominent figure of Catholic Reform and a student of Pietro Pomponazzi.
Sheila J. Rabin is Professor of History at Saint Peter’s University in Jersey City. She received her Ph.D. from The City University of New York Graduate Center where she worked with Edward Rosen and Richard Lemay; her dissertation was “Two Renaissance Views of Astrology: Pico and Kepler.” Since then Dr. Rabin’s articles on Pico have appeared in the journals Renaissance Quarterly and Explorations in Renaissance Culture, in the volume Hebraic Aspects of the Renaissance, and in the Encyclopedia of the Scientific Revolution and the Rabelais Encyclopedia. She wrote the chapter on Pico’s ideas toward astrology and magic in Pico della Mirandola: New Essays, edited by Michael Doherty, from Cambridge University Press. She was Book Reviews Editor of Renaissance Quarterly from 2003 to 2008. Currently she is working on a book, Science and Religion in the Renaissance Debate on Astrology, which will start with Pico.